Increasingly, many people wish to enjoy scent in daily life. Research and development accordingly have been conducted on fragrances, fragrance formulations and fragrance capsulation techniques, aiming at the following objectives: to allow scent to easily adhere to various types of fiber structures, such as clothing fabrics and bedclothes; to delay the disappearance of the scent by evaporation etc. after the adhesion; and to release strong scent even when such fragrances are used in a small quantity.
It has become a trend to add scent to the laundry in daily life. A typical method therefor is to use fragrance-containing laundry fabric softeners or detergents that allow pleasant scent to be retained on fabrics and clothes even during drying and, of course, to last over a long period of time after the drying. Accordingly, various types of fragrance compositions for such applications have been invented.
A wide variety of fragrance inventions have been created. Such fragrance inventions include fragrances and fragrance formulations, which themselves release scent, as well as products to which the fragrances and the fragrance formulations are added, such as fabric softeners, detergents, fragrance packages for laundry, spray-type fragrance packages used after laundering, etc.
A consumer can benefit from adding scent to the laundry at home or other places. An important benefit is that a consumer can repeatedly add a particular favorite scent to clothes at the time of laundering. Another benefit is that, by changing his/her clothes to different ones having a different fragrance added thereto, the consumer can change the scent they wear to a different one at once. Importantly, such usage of fragrances matches the current trends in favor of light fresh scent. Fragrances with light fresh scent are usually low molecular substances with high volatility. Such highly volatile fragrance components contained in a perfume or an eau de cologne, which is intended to be directly sprayed onto the skin, evaporate quickly (top notes, which form an initial impression of a perfume and dissipate within about several minutes). Making use of top notes over a long period of time is difficult and hence light fresh scent and favorable fresh scent are difficult to be retained. Scent serving the main function of a perfume or an eau de cologne (i.e., middle notes and base notes; the last lingering hint of scent of a perfume) is called heavy scent and is considered to be suitable to create formal impression and atmosphere.
However, attempts to fulfill the above wishes have not been made on fabrics to which scent is to be added. In particular, there has been no technical idea to pursue the improvement of the materials of fiber structures and thereby to increase the fabrics' absorption of a fragrance and to make the scent last longer. In more particular, there has been no technical idea to make light fresh scent last longer.
Similar attempts to the above, however, have been reported and an example thereof involves adding a scent component, a deodorizing component, or the like to fibers or fiber structures at the time of the production thereof (Patent Literature 1 and 2). Another example is a fragrance base material to be used for an aroma freshener, as described in Patent Literature 3.
These examples comprise a particular fragrance as a constituent thereof. Patent Literature 1 and 2 also describe a technique involving adding a fragrance to a fiber material at the time of the production thereof. However, unfortunately, preferences for scents are very personal and are related to individual sense of scents. Manufacturing and stocking a variety of products having different scents that will cover a wide range of personal preferences is very uneconomical. Further, such addition of a particular fragrance to a product at the time of the production may hinder the object of the present invention, in such a manner, for example, that later addition of a favorite fragrance by a consumer through laundering or other methods to a product having a residual fragrance that has been previously added thereto may result in unfavorable scent. Moreover, the previous addition of a particular fragrance to a product cannot fulfill the above-described consumers' wishes to repeatedly change the scent they wear to a different one at once and to wear light fresh scent.
As far as the applicants know, fragrances with clinging properties have been reported, but there has been no report that a fabric with a fragrance-retaining property has been able to be produced.